Alkira Exec: Network as a Service Means ‘No More Racking And Stacking’ In Data Closets

Sukruth Srikantha, Alkira’s vice president of solutions architecture, tells MES Computing about how NaaS can be of particular benefit to midmarket organizations.

(Sukruth Srikantha, VP, solutions architecture, Alkira)

Network-as-a-Service company Alkira recently teamed up with Nemertes, a research and strategic advisory company, to take a deep-dive look into how midmarket companies were managing their hybrid cloud environments.

Midsize companies are operating in a “more global economy,” John Burke, CTO of Nemertes, told MES Computing.

Burke said that the company’s research shows that midmarket organizations are “much more likely, even as relatively small companies, to be serving customers globally, to have operations globally, and specifically, to have services running in different parts of the world.”

Many midmarket organizations, he said, have a mix of services either in a physical location or in the cloud.

The challenge for the midmarket then becomes how to integrate everything running in a lot of different places.

One of the benefits Alkira customers said they got with its NaaS offering is a “consistent network infrastructure,” Burke said.

“They could connect to [Alkira’s platform] from the clouds that they’re in and then interconnect all their cloud infrastructures. As a result, it looks the same in every environment they’re operating in. So, [midsize organizations] don’t have to have specialists in the idiosyncrasies of networking in Amazon versus Google versus Microsoft. They can spin up connectivity between their on-premises stuff and their cloud stuff,” he said.

(John Burke, CTO, Nemertes)

He said these customers also have the capability to then deal with fairly standard business-level challenges like taking in a new partner and having the ability to spin up an extra network that allows their systems to connect with the new partner’s.

A NaaS service like Alkira’s lets businesses integrate networks with partners, or other companies they may have acquired or merged with. With Alkira, midsize companies have a “consistent” and “automated” experience, Burke said.

In addition, with a NaaS platform, customers can get more done with less staff. “They don’t have to add six more people to have all the network specialists they thought they were going to need. They’re making do with the staff they’ve got,” he added.

A Still-Emerging Technology

NaaS is still an emerging technology. Sukruth Srikantha, vice president of solutions architecture at Alkira, provided more insight into NaaS.

“We are a networking company, which is very different compared to [the] legacy way of doing networking, so there is no racking and stacking and configuring routers anymore,” Srikantha said.

NaaS is “all virtual. And you don’t need to worry about building your network, even about capacity,” he said.

Srikantha described the work Akira is doing with NaaS as “groundbreaking.”

“If you look at all the cloud service providers now, if you want to do the same thing, install a Windows machine, it’s 30 minutes, right? Versus like two, three days, right? That’s exactly what we are doing to networking, and it’s a new concept. When we started the company six years back, we were the only ones who were talking this language,” he said.

“But now, in the last three, four years, you can see ... Cisco, Juniper, a lot of legacy networking companies are also talking about as a service, and Gartner now has a category as well, and they talk a lot about as a service in networking, and the customer slowly started to understand ... the power of as a service, versus you buying hardware, which has humongous lead times. And of course, hardware [has] end of cycle. After four years or five years, you have to refresh everything, huge capital expenses, versus as a service [where] you consume what you need today, and there is no hardware at all, which means it doesn't hit your capital expense at all,” he added.

The NaaS market was valued at $6 million in 2022, according to one market report. The market is predicted to grow from $7.5 billion in 2023 to $42.8 billion by 2032, corroborated by other market reports.

Communication service providers that sell enterprise network services “cannot ignore” the NaaS space, according to research firm Gartner.

While there is “significant misalignment in the market on what is provided with network as a service (NaaS)-labeled offerings, the term has become popular, and many enterprise clients are investigating what is in it for them,” Gartner said.

The NaaS Road Map

Srikantha said that Alkira is currently working on incorporating zero-trust security into its NaaS offering, and that zero-trust networking will be “huge” in 2025. He said one thing in particular that midmarket customers have struggled with is building secured networks.

“And this security is, again, a big hole in the legacy world,” he said. “I mean, a BGP [Border Gateway Protocol] is a BGP, whether you go and configure on a Juniper or Cisco router, but cloud networking is where things have gotten really complicated because it’s not based on any standards, and there’s no protocol underneath.

“This is where when you look at a midmarket and you have network engineers who are pretty much taking care of all the branch to branch, a branch data center, sort of connectivity. Now, when they venture out into cloud ... they just don't have the expertise.”

“[We’ve seen] midmarket customers who have struggled to migrate few applications into AWS or Azure, and it’s taken them anywhere from 15 to 18 months, and we were able to in three weeks,” he said.